Primitive traits in religious revivals; a study in mental and social evolution

Front matter

EX LIBRIS

John P. Sanderson

Primitive traits in religious revivals; a

Dedication

n^O my New England Father and Mother, whose simple lives of industry and parental sacrifice and trust in the Invisible have made possible to me a broader training than theirs, but not a deeper practical sense or truer experience of faith and love, this volume is affectionately dedicated.

GUIDE-POSTS OF INVESTIGATION

" Though existing religious ideas and institutions have an average adaptation to the characters of the people who live under them, yet, as these characters are ever changing, the adaptation is ever becoming imperfect, and the ideas and institutions need remodeling with a frequency proportionate to the rapidity of the change."

Preface

I HAVE endeavored to present a sociological interpretation of religious revivals, a task which, so far as I know, has not been seriously attempted hitherto. I have aimed at a true scientific description, beginning with a provisional discrimination of the whole subject, continuing with an inductive investigation of particulars, and concluding with so much of explanation and practical suggestion as appears to flow naturally from the concrete material. It is an interpretation in terms of law and personality, a simple attempt to illustrate the profound proposition of Harnack that religion has its secrets, but no mysteries. I have used the term " revival " not in its broad Lutheran or Puritan sense, but in the narrower signification, which has grown up in recent centuries, of a particular method and a particular experience.

The book is not without an a priori vein. The doctrine of mental and social evolution is assumed throughout. The world of living men is regarded as in process of development from the animal and

VIU PREFACE

the primitive to the rational and the spiritual. There is also a guasi-a.ssumption, which I think is thoroughly justified, however, by the evidence, that the typical religious revival is characterized by the dominance of emotion in mass and in control. I have been surprised at the manner in which the facts and principles of psychology have everywhere come to the front as I have worked on. I ought not to have been surprised, for no worthy investigation in sociology ever was attempted which did not sink its roots deep into the mental life. I hope the book does not lack insight into any value which certain revivals of the past have possessed for society, or appreciation of the great human spirits who have frequently wrought well with what has become a seriously defective religious method. I hope that criticism has not exorcised sympathy.

I have undertaken not simply to discriminate spurious and genuine revivals, but to show that in genuine revivals themselves there are primitive traits which need elimination or modification in the interest of religious and social progress. The problem is not to quench or diminish spontaneous emotion, but to put it under full rational control. This book is not written with the vain thought of

PREFACE IX

attempting to beat back any incoming tide of vital faith by so much as the obstructive interposition of a single human opinion. Let some stubborn and hapless Cnut of science or theology essay that unworthy and fruitless labor ! But it is written to contribute, if possible, to the better ordering of religious method, that the tide, if it comes, may be rationally guided into reservoirs and channels and ditches, and may irrigate a thirsty land and not overwhelm it, and receding, leave far too much of wreck behind. Primarily, it has been my task to segregate the primitive and baser elements in the revival. But I have occasionally been led afield by a genuine interest in the subject as a whole, and by a desire to produce a work which would be not merely and adversely critical, but constructive in its tendency.

I have made honest effort in these pages to give exact credit to whom credit is due. But I ought to mention especially here the helpfulness of my honored preceptor. Professor Franklin H. Giddings, whose splendid constructive thinking in the " Inductive Sociology " has avowedly furnished important principles for the prosecution of this study.

When I confronted Professor Livingston Far-

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rand of the department of Ethnology at Columbia with the belief for which at the time I had scant evidence, that nervous instability must have been a normal characteristic of primitive man, it was he who called my attention to the facts of recent investigation among the northern Siberian tribes, the North American Indians, and elsewhere.

This book is the expansion of a dissertation, which was originally submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the faculty of Political Science at Columbia University.

FREDERICK MORGAN DAVENPORT.

Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., 1905.

Chapter I The Revival Essentially A Form Of Impulsive Social Action

Religious movements of magnitude have often assumed a mode which sociologists call sympathetic likemindedness. It is a term which perhaps deserves or requires a further word of description. Likeminded people are those whose mental and nervous organizations respond in like ways to the same stimuli. They might conceivably respond unconsciously to the same stimuli, as animals do. We should then call them instinctively likeminded. But it is at least doubtful whether there are people so low in the scale of mental development that they are not to some extent conscious of feeling, thinking and acting together. When we rise a step higher, however, we come upon a phenomenon which has played a great part in social, political and religious movements among all races of men. It has played a conscious part, though rational consciousness has by no means always been the controlling factor. This phenomenon has been called sympathetic likemindedness,^ and

B I the predominant mental characteristics of a population under its influence are suggestibility, imita^ tiveness, imagination and emotion. These are exceedingly primitive and probably universal mental traits. Just as every human being tends to respond to a sensation by some reflex movement, so every human being tends to respond to an idea implanted in his consciousness. He is suggestible. He is imitative. He is also more or less a creature of imagination and emotion. In proportion as these tendencies in a population are held in check, we have a population under control. We have deliberation and public opinion and social evolution rather than revolution.

But whatever else may be said of sympathetically likeminded people, — and much that is good may be said of them, — they are not likely to have their primitive and instinctive nervous tendencies and mental traits under the governance of the higher inhibitory centres. With them, suggestion and imitation, imagination and emotion, pass swiftly, impulsively and often resistlessly into the united action of the lynching mob, the super-emotional revival or the political revolution.

Normally, subjective and sympathetic likemindedness manifests itself in forms of objective and impulsive social action. And in our time these peculiar social movements have been studied and have been found to conform to law.^ There is the law of origin, that impulsive social action origi- 1 Giddings, " Elements of Sociology," p. 136.

REVIVALS A FORM OF IMPULSIVE SOCIAL ACTION 3

Hates among people who have least inhibitory control. This does not mean that the thinking out of the plan of action has its origin with this class of the community, but it does mean that the first movement towards carrying out the plan is likely to be made by the people who are least self-controlled. John Brown and Harper's Ferry preceded Grant and Vicksburg. An ill-balanced young lawyer led the Paris mob to the storming of the Bastile. Over and over again in the pages that follow we shall see the nervously unstable, the suggestible, the inexperienced, affected by the highly emotional revival earlier than the dignified and intelligent people of judgment and standing. This law is strikingly illustrated in that remarkable sympathetic social movement of the middle ages, the Crusades. We are in the habit of thinking of the Crusades as a series of organized and orderly military expeditions led by princes of Christian blood to wrest the Holy Land from the infidel — and so in fact they were before the Crusades were done. But first there were three great unorganized movements. By the middle of the eleventh century Jerusalem was in the hands of the Seljukian Turks, who cruelly harassed Christian pilgrims and heaped insult upon their sacred shrines. Peter the Hermit, on his return from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, at the instance of Pope Urban II, travelled widely and depicted the calamity vividly to the imagination oi Christendom. In 1095 a great council of the Church resolved upon the deliverance of the Holy

Sepulchre. No movement of armed forces was organized until two years later under Godfrey of Bouillon. But in 1096 Walter the Penniless, the ringleader of a mob of twenty thousand men, the dregs of humanity, passed through Germany, Hungary and into Bulgaria, devastating the country through which they passed with robbery and murder. Finally, on the verge of starvation, they stormed Belgrave, were crushed, and only the shattered remnants of a disorderly host found its way to Constantinople. Then Peter the Hermit led forty thousand men, women and children. In attempting to cross the Bosphorus they were routed and decimated. Later in the same year a horde of fifteen thousand lawless vagabonds under Gottschalk, a German priest, entered upon their sacred mission by massacring all Jews who unhappily crossed their path. But the most astounding outburst was that which preceded the fifth organized Crusade. In 12 12 a -great host of children, boys and girls, three armies of them, — one from France and two from Germany, — started on the pious pilgrimage. Some of these little ones returned to their homes, but it is probable that most of them perished of starvation or disease or were sold into slavery. . . . The initial step in sympathetic social action is taken by those who have least inhibitory control over the nervous and mental processes.

And the second law is the law of spread. Impulsive social action tends, through imitation, to

REVIVALS A FORM OP IMPULSIVE SOCIAL ACTION J

extend and intensify in geometrical progression.^ One individual influences a second, the two influence four, and like a stone thrown into a lake of still water, the single centre of impulse moves on in ever widening circles of suggestion and imitation, emotional action and reaction. This law is illustrated in the remarkable growth of early Christianity. On the day of Pentecost there were apparently about six hundred Christians confined to Palestine. At the accession of Constantine early in the fourth century, it is estimated that there were about ten millions of Christians, or onetenth of the empire's population. Gibbon places the figure at five millions, and others as high as twenty millions. Ten millions is probably approximately correct. If there had been a great number less than this, Constantine would hardly have chosen the Christians as the support of his empire. If there had been twenty or twenty-five millions, the persecution of Diocletian would no doubt have been impossible. A feeble six hundred on the day of Pentecost, a powerful ten millions in the days of Constantine ! Now one reason for the great spread of early Christianity growing out of the social conditions of the time, is often left out of account. There were great families of slaves, sometimes two or three hundred in a family. Christianity entered the house through a slave and ran by suggestion and imitation through the whole slave body. There were also large numbers of clubs

1 Giddings, " Elements of Sociology," p. 139.

and fraternities of all kinds in the early empire to whom the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was exceedingly congenial. And the cardinal precepts of the new religion swept through these organizations Uke a flame.-'

The great wave of religious interest which passed over the United States in 1857 furnishes another clear exemphfication of this law. During the summer there had occurred many business disturbances which slowly approached a climax of financial disaster. And finally on a single day, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., scores of banks and thousands of families were ruined. Wall Street collapsed, and the tremendous force of the almost unparalleled financial calamity was felt throughout the country. A few days later a solitary man, one Jeremiah C. Lanphier, a lay missionary in the employ of the Dutch Reformed Church in Fulton Street, New York City, became impressed with the idea that an hour of prayer, from twelve to one o'clock, would be beneficial to business men. He instituted it, and advertised it somewhat, but sat out the first half of the first meeting alone.^ At the end of the hour there were six present. Lanphier kept a diary and a record of the increase. At the second meeting there were twenty, at the third forty and at the fourth one hundred, and

1 1 am indebted to the Church History lectures of my former preceptor, Professor A. C. McGiffert, for this illustration.

^ Cf. Prime, " The Power of Prayer," an account of the revival of 1857.

REVIVALS A FORM OF IMPULSIVE SOCIAL ACTION /

then the numbers increased so rapidly that it was impossible to accommodate the people in one room. Overflow meetings were held in many churches in New York and Brooklyn, and great crowds went away unable to get into any of them. Men were organized by occupations, firemen for example, with an attendance of two thousand. Business men thronged the churches, all the means of access were blocked before the hour of prayer commenced and hundreds stood in the street during the hour. Soon the revival spread to Jersey City, Hoboken, Paterson and, a few days later, to Philadelphia, and ran rapidly through that city; then through New England to Boston, and up the Hudson to Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Rochester, Buffalo; and to Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago and other cities throughout the nation. The movement was resistless and cumulative, characterized by strong emotion but not by wild excitement.

And the third law of impulsive social action is the law of restraint. Sympathetic popular movements tend to spend themselves with abandon, and are held in check only if there are a considerable number of individuals scattered through the population who are trained in the habit of control, who are accustomed to subordinate feeling to rational considerations and who act as bulwarks against the advance of the overwhelming tide of imitation and emotion.^ We shall see in the pages that follow that in the more primitive religious revivals there is little or no restraint until the wave has spent its fury, while in others, calmer leadership within and critical judgment from without combine to hold in leash the natural excesses of the movement.

We must notice, also, that there appear to be certain physical and mental conditions which predispose to emotionalism. For example, sudden changes of climate from summer to winter, combined with monotony of topography, seem to be a factor in fixing the type of mind of the inhabitant of the Russian steppe.^ Physical surrounding has probably had its influence in establishing among the people of the great western plains in America a more radical and impulsive religious and political habit than that which characterizes the New Englander. There are other predisposing conditions of which we may speak with more confidence. Instinctive fear, when a population is under the spell of it, arouses great volumes of imagination and emotion, and powerfully induces sympathetic movements. We shall find, for example, that certain distinctive features of the Edwards revival in the first half of the eighteenth century in New England, and of the Kentucky revival of 1800, are explained by the environment of fear — fear of starvation, of wild beasts and savages — in which

1 Cf. Giddings, " Democracy and Empire," p. 56. ^ Giddings, " Inductive Sociology," p. 140 f.

REVIVALS A FORM OF IMPULSIVE SOCIAL ACTION Q

the colonists had lived, in New England for a century, in Kentucky for a shorter period.

Difficulty of communication and a great amount of ignorance in a population predispose to emotional movements. The three millions of white people in the southern mountains from Virginia to northern Alabama are known chiefly for their moonshine stills, their feuds, their murders, their excitable religious temperament and their illiteracy. And the last is to a great degree the cause of the others. They live in one of the great land-locked areas of the globe, comparable with the Basque country of the Pyrenees. They were early shut off from the remainder of the southern people, socially by an aversion to the institution of slavery, and economically by the fact that their mountain holdings furnished no such resources of wealth as the rich plantations of their neighbors in the low lands in the old slave days. And educational opportunities throughout their whole history have been very meagre and are exceedingly meagre to-day. It is not at all likely that they- are lacking in capacity, for their Scotch-Irish and English ancestors have been a great element of national strength. But they have been shut in by poverty and the mountains, their horizon has been limited by ignorance, and they have been at the mercy of primitive passion and primitive superstition.

And finally we must bear in mind constantly as we proceed that the effect of a sympathetic religious movement is greatly increased by the masslO PRIMITIVE TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS REVIVALS

ing of men and women in a psychological "crowd," a camp-meeting for instance. This is a purely social condition and has such important consequences that we shall return to the subject farther on. It will be sufficient here to remark that the natural result of the assembling of men in crowds, especially when skilful speakers engage their attention and play upon the chords of imagination and emotion, seems to be the weakening of the power of inhibition in each individual, and the giving of free rein to feeling and imitation. And when under these circumstances a powerful emotion, especially that of fear, is aroused in the consciousness of the assembly, all the phenomena of suggestion — even the highly reflex phenomena of hypnotic suggestion so called — are likely to develop. This will be most in evidence among primitive, superstitious and unlettered people, of course, for civilization shows itself in nothing more clearly than in the growing capacity for individual self-control, but they will also appear in the relatively higher stages of culture and experience if the combination of conditions, physical, mental and social, is strong enough to develop them. In fact there is no population, there are comparatively few individuals in any population, who cannot be swept from the moorings of reason and balanced judgment if brought under the mysterious and potent influence of the psychological "crowd."

Chapter II

The term " primitive " as applied to man is often used in two senses. It sometimes occurs as a synonym for aboriginal humans, and sometimes for contemporary savages. The mental capacity and characteristics of savages we know a good deal about from direct research among existing tribes. The mental capacity and characteristics of aboriginal peoples we know very little about except from a priori reasoning. It certainly would be unsafe to make too wide inferences of original human traits from what we know of savage traits and count upon these inferences as absolutely accurate, for existing savages have unnumbered thousands of years of inheritance stretching back of them, and there has probably been some mental development in their history, although this development has been in the main arrested.

There are not wanting marked indications that the mind of the animal no less than its physical organization is the result of a process of evolution. Certainly it is true that in all animal life up to man, the development of intelligence and the development of the nervous system proceed together. There has been a slow and steady evolution of the regulating centres — first the uniform spinal cord is supreme, then the medulla and the cord, then the basal ganglia, then the cerebrum.^ And the appearance of these progressively higher centres has always marked successive stages in the advance of intelUgence. When we come to man, we find " a ganglionic apparatus far surpassing in delicacy and complexity that of any other animal, and in correlation therewith we find man manifesting an unequalled range and variety of psychical function." ^ Now the mind of man is an inheritance from the animal mind, by extraordinary variation it may be, but an inheritance nevertheless. The question at once arises whether, as one school of anthropologists hold, the brain of man is an extraordinary variation and the mind of primitive man has potential capacity approximating that of modern civilized man, or whether, as another school of anthropologists hold, the original variation was small and mental complexity and capacity themselves have been an evolution. The first school, resting upon inductive research in the field, points to the fact, for instance, that while the heavy brain is more frequent among the Europeans than among the negroes, the actual statistical average of weights and sizes would not be very different for the negro and the European white. The bulk of the brains of each race would probably fall within about the same limits. And it is reasonable to suppose,

1 Cf. Spencer, "Principles of Sociology" (1-2), p. 520. « Iflice, " Christian Faith in an Age of Science," p. 27a therefore, they say, that so far as actual capacity goes, there has been no great advance. It would indeed be a formidable task, with our present knowledge, to attempt to decide between these opposing views, but happily it is not necessary to our purpose. For however the two schools of anthropologists may differ with respect to original potential capacity, the first as readily as the second would admit that there has been a considerable development of latent mental capacity along with change of environment and increase of experience.

Although the mind is a unity, it is not a rigid entity, but a group of conscious states or tendencies, which, within normal limits, shift even from day to day. It is also a matter of common observation that one personality displays a certain group of mental tendencies and another personality a higher or lower group. We say the two persons are not of the same type of mind. So, at successive stages of racial development, higher and higher groups of mental qualities have blossomed, so to speak, into higher and higher types of mind. And the primitive type which we see at least imperfectly represented in the savage and which a priori reasoning would urge as having been probably represented in the early human, is a physically active, highly emotional type, with feeble reasoning powers, — child of conjecture and imagination, — a type which ranges, to use a psychological phrase, from ideomotor to ideo-emotional. It is this type, representing the infancy of humanity, so far as we can study it among contemporary primitive people, to whose mental and nervous characteristics I wish to give some further attention. Whether or not contemporary primitives are practically aboriginal primitives, it is at least certain that we have among populations yet dwelling with us an exceedingly rudimentary and undeveloped type of mind.

With the more obvious mental traits and those not so important for our present purpose, we need not linger. For instance, the primitive man has a keen sense in directions in which that sense has been particularly trained. He is a remarkable hunter, and finds tracks of his game under circumstances that would present great difficulty to the eye of the man of much higher culture. He is strong in perception, but weak in logical interpretation of his perceptions, lacking in logical connection in his conclusions.^ This is no doubt largely the result of a crude experience. He has no abundant and more or less accurate tradition with which to compare and by which to test his new perceptions. And here arises a very interesting advance in the mental evolution of primitive man. He fills in the gaps, he makes connection between the perceptions, by the use of his imagination. And so the imagination among primitive people finally reaches a very considerable state of development, because of its tremendous

1 Cf. Boas, " The Mind of Primitive Man," address of the retiring president before the American Folk Lore Society, Baltimore, December 27, 1900.

utility. In its early period it is very crude, as it is to-day among the negroes of the United States, whose religious thinking, both lay and clerical, is very frequently one long stretch of most astounding images. Thus they fill in the gaps in the thought. I once heard a colored brother in a religious meeting in Tennessee, in the midst of mighty enthusiasm and the most lively assurance that he carried his whole audience with him, declare that the first thing he wished to do when he reached Heaven was to bathe his soul in the sea of glass ! And one hears frequently such experiences as the following recited in religious meetings, that at the time of conversion, when the recipient of the experience was in a cataleptic trance — as so many negroes are at that time — a little white man chopped open the breast with an axe, took the heart out, poured out the black blood, washed it pure in the purple stream, put it back and closed up the opening. This reminds one of the belief among the primitive Mohammedans that Mahomet's heart was actually taken out, washed and replaced by the Almighty.^

And this vividness of imagination among primitive peoples has important consequences. Whatever the savage vividly conceives he believes with all his soul. And this helps to account for his credulity, for the dreadful hold that superstition has upon him. His imagination peoples his environment with a world of spirits, good and evil,

1- Cf. Spencer, " Principles of Sociology " (i-i), p., 343- dwelling in trees and animals and in the whistling wind, in the darkness, in the tempest, in the shadow, in the echo, in all things animate and inanimate, more powerful than himself, powerful to aid, powerful to harm. A large part of his conscious hfe is devoted to propitiating the friendly, and warding off the hostile, spirit. Hence the rapid growth of charm and magic, medicine-men, exorcists and conjurers. These superstitions have made their way so deeply into the mind of the race that they are by no means rooted out even in highly developed communities. And among primitive people everywhere they show much of their pristine strength. The negro people in the South to-day, for example, are enveloped in a cloud of superstition. The belief in signs, charms, spells, dreams, except among the few intelligent members of the race, is very general.

" Many neighborhoods have an old man or woman who possesses unearthly powers and who is constantly appealed to for assistance in connection with love-affairs and the quarrels of the colored people and in cases of protracted or mysterious sickness. The belief in the power of the evil eye is nearly universal, as is the notion that persons, domestic animals, wells and particular places can be tricked — that is, have a curse or malign spell put upon them — by anybody who knows the charm or method of procedure which will produce such a result. In matters of love, courtship and marriage, the negroes are usually extremely jealous and suspicious, and magical arts are commonly invoked to secure affection and to alienate those who are already attached to each other. They usually include the use of a scrap of clothing which has been worn by the person that is to be tricked, or a shred of his hair, a piece of a finger nail or toe nail or even some dust from his shoes." ^ Of course it is easy to recognize in these peculiar forms a principle of magic that is widely disseminated among primitive people, namely that for the purpose of control of the individual, it is only necessary to have a part of him or his belongings, even the most minute. These are only everyday examples, among a people whom we know, of a vast mass of superstition which overlays the life of primitive man. The records of ethnological study are full of it.

And it is a natural inference from what has been said of the primitive man's view of the world, peopled by demon spirits, that perhaps his strongest emotion should be fear. Of this I think ethnological research leaves little doubt. Herbert Spencer was so convinced of it that in his sociological system fear of the living among primitive people becomes the root of all political control, and fear of the dead the root of all religious control.^ And Professor WiUiam James places fear with lust and anger as one of the "three most exciting emotions of which human nature is susceptible,"

1 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1882, "Studies in the South."

2 Spencer, " Principles of Sociology " (l-l), p. 437-

c and says of it that it is a " genuine instinct and one of the earliest shown by the human child." ^ And we have here an explanation of the perfectly enormous amount of latent fear that exists in every population on the face of the earth, an inheritance from the primitive days, showing itself in theatre panics and army routs, ever ready to burst into activity in spite of the fact that, in general, progress is measured by the elimination of actual outward fear.

And finally we may mention together a group of primitive characteristics, the chief of which is nervous instability, with its inevitable accompaniments of remarkable imitativeness and suggestibility and great lack of inhibitive control. I think perhaps the characteristic of nervous instability applied to primitive man may arouse some opposition in the mind of the reader. There is a popular impression that the South Sea Islander, for example, knows nothing of nerves, and that the North American Indians are an exceedingly phlegmatic race. But there is a good deal of evidence accumulating which indicates that while these primitive people may not suffer from derangements of the nervous system as the more highly civilized suffer, it is nevertheless true that their nervous and mental organization is iai a very plastic, unstable condition. We find some excellent confirmations of this among the northern Siberian peoples. Castren observed long ago that 1 JameS) " Psychology — Briefer CouMe," p. 408.